Barcodes and other are optical machine readable images used extensively to represent information about an object. Decoding or reading a barcode is accomplished by translating the patterns of the barcode, such as bars and spaces in linear barcodes or blocks or other features in a 2D barcode, into the corresponding numbers or characters. Barcodes are widely used for encoding information and tracking purposes in retail, shipping and industrial settings. Barcodes and their uses are becoming more mainstream, however their uses remain mostly in providing static information about a particular product or service, or in recent years providing a static link to a website in relation to the product or service associated with the barcode.
For years, payment systems, and banking and payment processing in general, have been trying to engineer a transaction processing technology that is secure, efficient and easy to use, thereby facilitating the online transfer of funds between entities. In particular, providing one entity with some control in how their personal financial information is provided to directly another entity involved in the funds transfer has so far been elusive. This inability to involve more entity control of the funds transfer transaction between entities while at the same time streamlining the amount of time and information entities must share with each other during funds transfer has effectively relegated experience in online electronic direct funds transfer to that of yesterday rather than the future. In particular, barcodes have been used in an effort to speed up the customer shopping experiences by providing merchant terminals information about the product when scanned through a checkout scanner, i.e. the price and brief description of the product that the barcode is attached/applied to. However, any use of barcodes outside of the customer shopping experience, other than as a look up service for a price of a product on a product by product basis, is simply not available.
At the same time, developments in the field of mobile commerce are being facilitated by improved functionality and features available on mobile devices, and by such functionality and features becoming more commonplace on current mobile devices. For example, cell phones, smart phones and tablet computers nowadays are commonly integrated, multi-functional devices. In addition to their core, basic functionality, they will often have, or can be configured to have, web-enabled functionality, various other communication capabilities (e.g., e-mail, text, wi-fi, etc.), camera functions, scanning and graphical image handling functionalities and other capabilities. Graphical interfaces of desktop computers have also become more advanced in their functionality and provided features. However, to date, the direct funds transfer experience between entities (either in person or online) has not benefited from these advanced functionality and provided features of desktop GUIs and mobile devices.